Welcome to the Café Julien. Take a seat at the bar and have a tumbler of whisky. Here you'll find everyone who is anyone in Greenwich Village.There are the moon-eyed lovers who cannot tear themselves apart, yet have no idea how to stay in love. There are the starving artists turned conmen, rinsing their friend's reputation after he staged his own death so his paintings might rise to posthumous fame. There are grubby publishers, conniving opportunists, art critics and kept mistresses.Featuring a cast drawn from high life and low across Manhattan, including a few familiar faces from Powell's previous novels, this wickedly funny work takes us into the thick of bohemian New York. At once sharp, serious and riotously entertaining, it memorialises an artists' watering hole at precisely the moment its glory days are drawing to a close. But first: just one more martini.



Dawn Powell (1896-1965) was a novelist and playwright known for her satires of New York's cultural and literary circles. Born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, she endured a tumultuous childhood before running away at thirteen to live with an aunt who encouraged her writing aspirations. After graduating from Lake Erie College, Powell moved to New York City, immersing herself in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village. She gained early recognition for her witty pieces in The New Yorker and Esquire, and in 1939 became a Scribner author, sharing the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Although Powell enjoyed a devoted circle of admirers, her work drifted into obscurity after her death. Interest in her novels was later revived by the tireless work of Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Tim Page, executor of her estate, and also through Gore Vidal's influential appraisal in The New York Review of Books.



This book takes place in Greenwich Village at a run-down cafe where artists and writers drink to their misadventures. . . Powell's satire is cutting, but never cynical. She writes with sharp words but soft eyes



Dawn Powell's parish, as her followers know, is wealth-infested, mink-mad Manhattan. Her arsenal, as this latest novel proves, retains its fire-power - including the most exquisite acid since Dorothy Parker



When I read the novels of Powell, I imagine her writing as though carving a diamond out of the rough. It takes a particular kind of skill to be as precise as Powell is. She cuts and cleaves at her characters until their facets shine, and her prose has the same effect - cool, hard, and glittering



A huge talent, Dawn Powell. Sentence by sentence, among the greatest writers of her time